Re: procmail redirect problem

[Craig Dickson <crdic@yahoo.com>]

Martin A. Hansen wrote:

> i have set up procmail to sort incoming mail into subfolders. the mail
> is sortet and put in the subfolders all right, but every mail is put
> inside its own folder so i get:
> 
> root@homer:/home/maasha/mail# ls -al debian-user/
> total 44
> drwxr-xr-x    2 maasha   maasha       8192 Dec 17 09:50 .
> drwx------    6 maasha   maasha       4096 Dec 17 10:01 ..
> -rw-------    1 maasha   maasha       3091 Dec 17 09:11 msg.OWeB
> -rw-------    1 maasha   maasha       2462 Dec 17 09:45 msg.WWeB
> -rw-------    1 maasha   maasha       3142 Dec 17 09:18 msg.XWeB
> -rw-------    1 maasha   maasha       2537 Dec 17 09:20 msg.YWeB
> -rw-------    1 maasha   maasha       4202 Dec 17 09:48 msg.dWeB
> -rw-------    1 maasha   maasha       2607 Dec 17 09:06 msg.mVeB
> -rw-------    1 maasha   maasha       2224 Dec 17 09:50 msg.uWeB
> 
> and each folder contains the correct mail.
> 
> this is most annoying :) ! i didnt ask (i think) for any msg.foo folders!
> 
> this is my .procmailrc file:
> 
> maasha@homer:~$ cat .procmailrc
> 
> PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb:/bin:/usr/local/bin:.
> MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
> PMDIR=$HOME/procmail
> 
> LOGFILE=$PMDIR/procmaillog
> INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/maashamail.rc
> 
> LOCKFILE=$HOME/.lockmail
> 
> 
> and this is the rc file:
> 
> maasha@homer:~/procmail$ cat maashamail.rc
> 
> #Redirects
> :0:
> * ^Resent-From:.*debian-user@lists.debian.org
> debian-user
> 
> :0:
> * ^To:.*sslug-netvaerk@sslug.dk
> sslug

The .procmail and .rc files look okay. You don't seem to be telling
procmail to use a "one message per file" format such as maildir or mh.
Besides, the filenames are all wrong for either of those.

Did the directory /home/maasha/mail/debian-user already exist when you
set up procmail this way? It could be that procmail sees that you're
specifying a directory, rather than an mbox file, as the destination,
and perhaps that causes it to put each message in its own file within
that directory?

You could test this hypothesis as follows:

1. Stop fetchmail.

2. Rename the directory debian-user to any other name just to get it out
   of the way. Let's say you call it "du", just so we have a name to refer
   to it in the following steps.

3. cd into the "du" directory and run the following command:

       for f in *; do cat $f | procmail; done

   This will take all your old debian-user messages and run them back
   through procmail again.

4. Now find out where procmail put those messages.

   If it created an mbox file called /home/maasha/mail/debian-user, and
   put both messages into it, then your problem is solved.

   If it just re-created the debian-user directory, and put each message
   into a separate file in that directory, then you still have no
   solution.

   Either way, you can now delete the "du" directory and all the files in
   it, as procmail has created duplicates of all those messages in the
   new debian-user file/directory.

5. Restart fetchmail.

Hope this helps.

Craig